Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

The striking shift of artistic method at a certain point in the career of Caroline Gordon is familiar to anyone who knows her work. Also well known is the fact that the change occurs around the time of her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1947. Generally, the novels she published before that crucial event are epic in their sweep...